Nous Research raises $90M at a $1.5B valuation and launches ‘Hermes for Businesses’
Open-source Hermes Agent passes 22M downloads
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra160 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.599 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash190 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7129 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 99 days before it.
Key facts
- Round: $90M Series B led by Robot Ventures; Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung and 1789 Capital (where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner) participated; total raised $158M (TechCrunch)
- Valuation: $1.5B post-money per TechCrunch; the WSJ’s first report gave $1.2B (Techmeme summary)
- Hermes Agent: 22M+ downloads since February (WSJ); 24M+ clones and ~2.5% of global AI token usage (TechCrunch)
- Annualized revenue ~$36M in mid-September 2026, projected above $100M by year-end (TechCrunch)
- New product: Hermes for Businesses, custom agents for multi-step workflows with private data handling
What happened
The WSJ (paywalled) reported the round first; TechCrunch confirmed it and the higher valuation the same day.
Why it matters
Hermes Agent is one of the most-used open-source agent harnesses, and Nous is one of the few US labs focused on open models to reach a billion-dollar valuation.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 press
Press
Changes
- Filed